In the modern world, compassion easily slides into sentimentality and moral cowardice. Doctors like to think that their prisoners are telling the truth. Prisoners are often not like that; but inexperienced and weak doctors are reluctant to recognise it or be “judgmental”, the worst moral failing in the modern world. And so it is Goldilocks against Genghis Kahn.

Medicine has from the first had the kind of relationship with Olympic sports that non-Roman auxiliaries had to the Roman legions. When the games were resuscitated, doctors had little compunction in prescribing drugs to athletes that made them perform better, or (what is almost the same thing) made them think that they would…

…[D]octors acted as advisers to the sporting authorities in the communist countries when they were determined that their young female gymnasts should dominate the sport. The activities of those doctors were ethically little better than medical participation in torture.

My own objection, however, to [athletes’ physical] deformities is different: that to devote one’s life to, say, throwing a javelin a fraction of an inch further than anyone else has ever thrown it before is a deformation of the soul. But that, of course, cannot be measured by any instrument, and not everyone will agree.

It is not that India tried and failed. It did not try, and therein lies its peculiar wisdom and glory. Almost alone of the nations of the world, it more or less ignored the Games. But it is India, whose government does nothing to encourage (or deter) its athletes, that is right, not the rest of the world.

There is a bimodal distribution of countries that are enthusiastic about winning Olympic medals: They are either populist or ideological. Britain, for example, falls into the former category. Woe betide the British person who dares to suggest that his country’s excellent performance at the Games wasn’t a sign of national regeneration but of national frivolity and meretriciousness, to which its population and its leaders now turn as naturally as some flowers turn to the sun.

There are no prizes for guessing into which category falls North Korea, which did about a hundred times better at the Games than India. There is nothing a totalitarian regime likes more than devoting its citizens to pointless activities, such as throwing the javelin, and then claiming, when one of them does it better than anyone else in the world, that it proves the brilliance of the dictator and the beneficent efficiency of his rule. How else could such excellence result?

The former Indian finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee (now the president), said that India didn’t need British aid which, he added, was “peanuts” anyway. He was right on both counts, but oddly enough his pronouncement – no more than the most obvious truth – was met by almost grovelling British requests to continue aid to India. Why?

One hesitates to employ an explanation that a polytechnic lecturer in politics might favour, but there is surely in this urgent desire to send aid to our former possession the hangover of a colonial superiority complex, allied to the hope that the world has not changed as much as it seems to have done: that, in short, we are still top dog, or at any rate very nearly so. If we give them aid, it must be because they need it and therefore that we are superior to them in some way. It seems to have escaped the notice of our Government, at least, that it required an Indian takeover of Land Rover and Jaguar to make a go of them, the task being beyond our organisational powers.

To use a Chinese rather than an Indian expression, the Mandate of Heaven has moved eastwards.

Further criticism of the Olympics, and its host country, from Dalrymple in City Journal:

Watching the Olympics, Dalrymple sees parallels with Edward Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

This Los Angeles Times piece is an extract of Dalrymple’s forthcoming (to the web; it’s already out in print form) essay in the Summer 2012 issue of City Journal. He discusses a paradox: although the NHS ranks lower than other systems in many measures, the British are more satisfied with their system than the citizens of other countries are with theirs.

Yes, when necessary. But of course, “The art is in knowing when it is necessary.“

In a piece for the Library of Law and Liberty, Dalrymple points out the obvious flaw in the arguments of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who says that humans are fundamentally irrational:

In City Journal, Dalrymple gives his thoughts on the opening ceremony of the Olympics, among which is: